Actually you could say it’s difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons, whether it be under or overreported.

This would include the things like firing healthcare workers, leading to other problems being undiagnosed, and worsening instead of being treated. I would also include lockdowns and mask mandates as being responsible for increased amounts of depression, which has a known poor impact on survival over time, and that's not just counting suicide.

if your going to make shit up at least make up believable bullshit.

And it doesn't have to be widespread - given the thin staffing margins that hospitals already run on, losing a small amount of people in a large facility can have outsized effects.

I'd thank you to engage with the argument in good faith per the site guidelines, or don't bother responding.

once you actually have a position that can be discussed. show me evidence of your position and I'll stop calling it a bat shit insane conspiracy theory.

right now all you've done is assert complete bullshit. I can link to articles with hospitals stating how many of their staff they've fired due to anti-vax behaviors. I doubt you can find a single instance of a hospital shortage due directly to the few thousand works in the entire country who were fired for their anti-vax beliefs.

even if you did find a hospital in that position, the issue certainly isn't wide spread enough to even merit a footnote when it comes to health policy.

Some doctors are reporting adverse/fatal effects associated with the use of Remdesivir (which hospitals are using to treat COVID patients). These issues include acute kidney injury, bradycardia, and death. The CDC has counted these deaths as COVID deaths as well.

There are also other aspects of COVID that seem difficult to suss out. For example, how many people have died from the vaccines? VAERS is reporting 22,193 vaccine-related deaths and over 1 million adverse reactions. There are also deaths and suicides caused by our response to COVID; e.g., the lockdowns, depression, job loss, fear of going to the doctor/hospital due to COVID, etc. Those aren't being counted as COVID-related deaths by the CDC, but perhaps they should be.

Even if you removed all the politicization/propaganda of both COVID and the vaccines, it still seems like we've made a lot of mistakes during the past two years that would make producing an accurate death count virtually impossible.

This must be a golden age for those doing a dissertation on media studies. So many quant-driven narratives, so little time. Hopefully cross-country data and narratives are being archived and aggregated into an open-data academic repository that can be studied in coming years.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

> recent study from Israel showed that while a fourth dose of an mRNA vaccine boosted antibodies, the level was not high enough to prevent infection by the Omicron variant ... the debate appears to have shifted with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) saying on Friday that international regulators now preferred clinical studies to be carried out before approval of a new vaccine ... it may not be possible to realise a current plan to launch an Omicron-targeting vaccine by the end of March ... Inclusion of clinical trial data in the regulatory filings may have an impact on the delivery of initial batches.

It's like arguing about the raw data of the Wright brothers flight, when millions of people are flying around the world on 747s. Was it relevant in the past? Yes. Is it relevant today? No.

You want to know about vaccine safety? Look at excess mortality, hospital admissions, and long-term health problems of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, today. Ten billion COVID vaccines have been administered around the world in the past year. Any of the data we've gathered from that is about a thousand times more relevant to literally anything we could be doing, than raw study data on a few thousand people.

Most ethical and legal systems around the world, in fact, would use that evidence to both convict the criminal, and then independently recommend separate sanctions for breaking procedures.

But we're not even talking about ethics or legality, here. We are talking about knowledge. People claim that we don't know about the safety of vaccines because we don't have data on trials conducted on thousands of people.

... Yet we have data about vaccines administered to billions of people. Why don't those critics look at that data, instead?

It's because knowledge and fact-finding isn't the point of that complaint. The people asking about this don't actually care about having a data-driven argument about the safety or efficacy of vaccines, they just found a procedural problem, that they can play a political game with. The politics is the entire point.

Heart disease, unintentional injuries, Alzheimer disease, and diabetes all jumped more than the expected trend.

2021 numbers I don't think will be finalized for another month or so.

As for excess deaths, it presumably depends on how well the country can endure the self-inflicted downsides (such as a recession) that comes with it. Countries where it causes severe problems probably are the very ones who didn't have the political will to maintain the lockdowns, leading to some biased conclusions. We also have lots of other issues caused by covid response such as shortages and spiking prices all over. Being outright dodged by pointing blame at some indermediate actor like "corporate supply chains" or "hoarders" or whatever.

The point is there are arguments that can be made on all sides. No need to insult and dismiss people.

Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful:

https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-400-studies-on-the...

Prepare a sufficiently convincing argument against each and every one of them, and against the credentials of each and every author, before using the term "denialist" in application to anyone other than yourself.

It's at about the same level as the counter argument regarding Sweden (which is one reason I made it).

Have a look through the studies I linked, you'll find several that perform rigorous analysis on a large number of countries, including in some cases specifically regarding excess mortality.

For example, have a look at Figures 2A and 2B from the following study. 38 countries compared by length of initial lockdown measures, versus per capita excess mortality for the period, and then the same measure compared across all states of the US:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28930/w289...

This doesn't support the hypothesis that lockdowns reduce excess deaths.

Lockdowns working/not-working and/or causing collateral damage potentially eliminating other gains is not even remotely on par with astrology.

Lockdowns used in this manner are entirely unprecedented, and the long-term results cannot be known by anyone, only guessed at.

Your rigid adherence to them as beacons of purity only demonstrates your religious-like faith in them, which strikes me as having far more in common with astrology than well-evidenced arguments by well-credentialed individuals that they might not work or be counterproductive.

What I object to is your demand that anyone disagreeing with you first go through 400 studies, individually, and find the flaws in them, and destruct the credentials of the authors.

> Here is a summary of over 400 studies demonstrating lockdowns are ineffective or harmful:

You're welcome to present studies demonstrating the opposite, but even if you can find 400 of them (and I doubt you can), the best we'd have arrived at would be equal uncertainty either way.

The longterm results of anything for which a long term has not yet elapsed can indeed only be guessed at. The fact I need to point this out to many people is striking in its resemblance to some kind of mass delusion on their part.

> Lockdowns used in this manner are entirely unprecedented, and the long-term results cannot be known by anyone, only guessed at.

So which one is it? Are your studies useful, or can the results only be guessed at, and so what's the point of your 400 studies?

> The longterm results of anything for which a long term has not yet elapsed can indeed only be guessed at. The fact I need to point this out to many people is striking in its resemblance to some kind of mass delusion on their part.

It's amazing that you tell other people this yet don't seem to understand it yourself.

Can you explain this more? Surely a hospital doesn't just get money for simply classifying it. How does a hospital benefit from classifying someone's treatment as Covid related other than being paid for the necessary treatment?

> U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield agreed that some hospitals have a monetary incentive to overcount coronavirus deaths as they do deaths for other diseases. “I think you’re correct in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too. Really, in the HIV epidemic, somebody may have a heart attack but also have HIV — the hospital would prefer the [classification] for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement,” Redfield said during a House panel hearing Friday when asked by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer about potential “perverse incentives.”

For families, Covid classification for a death enabled up to $9000 for funeral expenses, https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/covid-funeral-reimburs...

The 2nd point offers a financial incentive for families to agree with hospital (mis)classification, i.e. it aligns the financial incentives of family and hospital towards Covid attribution.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...

> It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1]

Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease.

Where elderly means > 40 and chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure".

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precaut...

Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments are still very effective in preventing deaths among the elderly population.

The CDC says > 40% of US adults are obese (> 100 Million people!) and 13% of US adults have diabetes. If that's not a chronically sick population I don't know what is.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...

My big problem with the initial lockdowns was not really about the larger lockdown at all - we just (obviously in hindsight) went too far with locking down larger, wide open places where people exercise.

Spring break in Miami with people crammed onto a beach? Probably a bad idea. A few surfers going in the water a hundred feet from one another and some other people doing a morning run? Likely a net benefit to Covid outcomes.